This is the text of the 49th Maronite Podcast
We continue with the story of Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert. Charles Reding is at lunch with Mr Malcolm, and says that he finds sounds and scents to be more “intellectual” than the other senses because they have no shape, and are therefore less material. (97) This is a significant point, because it goes not only to the question of our sense impressions, and the knowledge we derive from them, but even more profoundly – how we are moved by the impact of impressions which cannot be analysed. By shining a limelight on the role of sensory impressions, he shows the limits of rationality. Thus, Charles explains:
… scents are complete in themselves, yet do not consist of parts. Think how very distinct the smell of a rose is from a pink, a pink from a sweet-pea, a sweet-pea from a stock, a stock from lilac, lilac from lavender, lavender from jasmine, jasmine from honeysuckle, honeysuckle from hawthorn, hawthorn from hyacinth, hyacinth … And these are only the scents of flowers; how different flowers smell from fruits, fruits from spices, spices from roast-beef or pork-cutlets, and so on. Now … these scents are perfectly distinct from each other, and sui generis; they never can be confused; yet each is communicated to the apprehension in an instant. Sights take up a great space, a tune is a succession of sounds; but scents are at once specific and complete, yet indivisible. Who can halve a scent? they need neither time nor space; thus they are immaterial or spiritual. (98)
St Newman returns to this later in Grammar of Assent, but more theoretically. I think the point is that scents and sounds are impulses of action: they affect what we do and what we do not. A bad smell tells us not to eat, church bells can move us to feeling pious. We can form attachments to places and ceremonies because of the sensory associations, and these can be more lasting than a logical argument. One can argue against a proposition, but not against a feeling conjured up by a scent or a sound.
The next significant scene is when Willis informs Reding that he is becoming a Catholic. Reding is not pleased, declaring: “Oh, Willis, so you have separated yourself from us for ever! …you have taken your course, we keep ours: our paths are different.” (107) It is good writing on St Newman’s part to have had someone other than his hero become a Catholic first, and so have Reding say to him exactly what would be said to he himself later on – which of course all happened in St Newman’s life. We start to enter imaginatively into the hurt feelings aroused by the act of conversion, without the additional pain, at this point, of attaching them to the hero of the novel.
Another painful note is struck when Reding reproves Willis on the grounds that, in examining Catholicism while at Oxford, he had been disobeying the authorities set over him. Willis replies that he had been obeying God rather than men. Doubtless St Newman had answered the same charge the same way, and Charles then retorts, as must have been said to St Newman: “I see you have disobeyed men … I trust you have been obeying God.” (109)
The argument having been begun, Morley, a friend of Willis’s, says to Charles that the Anglicans have no faith: that is, that they are at liberty to believe almost anything. Reding knows that this is a very strong point, but does not yield. “I am under teaching,” he says, “I am not yet taught.” (110)
This is a fair reply, but it can only be temporary. One cannot suspend judgment forever, and shortly afterwards, in a debate with Sheffield, Reding makes just the point which Mr Morley had: “… nobody knows what to believe, no one has a definite faith, but the Catholics and the Puseyites; no one says, ‘This is true, that is false; this comes from the Apostles, that does not’.” (119) Sheffield said that this would mean that one should have confidence in Islam because they are dogmatic. Reding counters by saying: “I did not say a creed was everything … or that a religion could not be false which had a creed; but a religion can’t be true which has none.” (119) This is still applicable today: if a religion does not propose a creed, even if only implicitly, then how can it be said to be true? After all, truth is a property of propositions.
When he was studying the Anglican Articles with Mr Upton, Reding asked whether the Real Presence meant that Christ was present in the elements of the offerings, or only in the soul. Mr Upton said that it was an open question. This is hardly satisfactory, as the Real Presence, if true, must be a vital and essential fact. When Charles then asked whether Christ was present in fact or only in effect, Mr Upton “answered decisively, “in effect,” which seemed to Reding to mean no real presence at all.” (127) This was dispiriting enough, but then St Newman introduces a most difficult question: the doctrine of eternal punishment.
On the one hand, it seems impossible to believe, but then, as he writes: “… what is faith in its very notion but an acceptance of the word of God when reason seems to oppose it? How is it faith at all if there is nothing to try it?” This thought fully satisfied him. The only question was, Is it part of the revealed word? “I can believe it,” he said, “if I know for certain that I ought to believe it; but if I am not bound to believe it, I can’t believe it.” Accordingly he put the question to Mr. Upton whether it was a doctrine of the Church of England; that is, whether it came under the subscription to the Articles. He could obtain no answer. Yet if he did not believe this doctrine, he felt the whole fabric of his faith shake under him.” (128) Once more, we can all enter into his feelings.
His perplexity was increased by an avoidance of what one had to believe in order to accept the Articles: “we only sign the Articles as articles of peace; not as really holding them, but as not opposing them. Therefore, when we sign the Articles, we only engage not to preach against them.” (131) In other words, one does not have to believe them to share communion with Anglicans, but one must not oppose them. But does that also entail then one cannot do or say something else which contradicts or differs from them? If so, then it must come down to being the same as believing them. At the end of the chapter, Reding hits on what may be the most potent answer to such a position: what is the basis, the authority, for such a position?
Not long afterwards, Charles’ father dies. When he returns to the family home, with the inevitable sadness, he realises that small issues have ceased to bother him. They have vanished “before this tangible calamity. He then understood the difference between what was real and what was not.” (157) Once more, St Newman is approaching the question he feels so keenly: reality. The death of a loved one is real; small quarrels and doubts are not.
Rumours begin that Willis regrets his conversion, and has rejoined the Anglican Church. However, these turn out to be untrue. By this simple subsidiary story-line, we realise how often baseless stories would swirl around these people’s heads, and that gossip should not be believed, and certainly not indulged in. Gradually, we learn that Willis had written a letter saying that his experience had shown him that one cannot live on sentiment: one needs faith to be a Catholic. Catholicism is not only has a different idea of worship and prayer than the Anglican, but is “a new religion,” and discovering this could discourage a convert. (186) The letter had been construed to mean that Willis himself was disappointed, and had not merely been tested. St Newman is making a point through Willis’ letter: as he says, some might see a beautifully engraved church screen, and be “carried away by romance.” (189) But that is no basis for decision.
A later conversation turns to the Anglican and Protestant unfriendliness to clerical celibacy. This, of course, is still a sore point between Catholics and Orthodox on the one hand, and Protestants on the other. Charles Reding says: “… it seems to me as much a yoke of bondage … to compel marriage as to compel celibacy.” (193) A friend objects that because God commanded Adam and Eve to “increase and multiply,” celibacy is “unnatural.” “Supernatural,” Charles countered. (195) Mr Carlton suggests that this is a “word without an idea,” that is, a purely verbal jousting. Charles then gives content to the word “supernatural”:
“It seems to me … that Christianity, being the perfection of nature, is both like it and unlike it; – like it, where it is the same or as much as nature; unlike it, where it is as much and more. I mean by supernatural the perfection of nature.” (196)
The novel returns to St Newman’s main theme, the development of thoughts in the mind, and especially their maturing into conviction:
It is impossible to stop the growth of the mind. Here was Charles with his thoughts turned away from religious controversy for two years, yet with his religious views progressing, unknown to himself, the whole time. It could not have been otherwise, if he was to live a religious life at all. If he was to worship and obey his Creator, intellectual acts, conclusions, and judgments must accompany that worship and obedience. He might not realise his own belief till questions had been put to him; but then a single discussion with a friend … would bring out what he really did hold to his own apprehension—would ascertain for him the limits of each opinion as he held it, and the inter-relations of opinion with opinion. He had not yet given names to these opinions, much less had they taken a theological form; nor could they, under his circumstances, be expressed in theological language … (202)
But these opinions came to form, as St Newman says: “something which had a body in it, which had a momentum which could not be passed over as a vague, sudden sound or transitory cloud, but which had much behind it which made itself felt, which struck heavily.” (203) This brings us to the role of the convert’s own decision. Is he not using private judgment in leaving the church of his birth, the very private judgment which he will later forsake for the authority of the Catholic Church? St Newman says that, in that case, private judgment is a necessary but temporary means to a higher end:
… here we see what is meant when a person says that the Catholic system comes home to his mind, fulfils his ideas of religion, satisfies his sympathies, and the like; and thereupon becomes a Catholic. Such a person is often said to go by private judgment, to be choosing his religion by his own standard of what a religion ought to be. Now it need not be denied that those who are external to the Church must begin with private judgment; they use it in order ultimately to supersede it; as a man out of doors uses a lamp in a dark night, and puts it out when he gets home. … There is no absurdity, then, or inconsistency in a person first using his private judgment and then denouncing its use. Circumstances change duties. (203-4)
This is a powerful and extremely well-out phrase: “Circumstances change duties.” In another passage of remarkable insight, he writes that rather than having a fully formed private judgment by which we judge of a system, as for example, the Catholic Church, we find that the teachings of the Church correspond to and conform with our own views, indeed:
He sees that it justifies his thoughts, explains {205} his feelings; he understands that it numbers, corrects, harmonises, completes them; and he is led to ask what is the authority of this foreign teaching; and then, when he finds it is what was once received in England from north to south, in England from the very time that Christianity was introduced here; that, as far as historical records go, Christianity and Catholicism are synonymous; that it is still the faith of the largest section of the Christian world; and that the faith of his own country is held nowhere but within her own limits and those of her own colonies; nay, further, that it is very difficult to say what faith she has, or that she has any,—then he submits himself to the Catholic Church, not by a process of criticism, but as a pupil to a teacher.
St Newman adds that he knows some people convert with the wrong attitude. They are hypercritical, and continue being so even when they have converted, and so just as they argued their way into the Church, they argue their way out of it. (205) There are many people who, by their attachment to their own opinions, may yet in their souls and spirits, minds and judgments, place themselves above the teachers of whatever Church they find themselves in. (205-6) Looking back on his character Charles Reding, who has been slowly but surely moving towards the Church, he writes: “Let us be patient with him, as his Maker is patient, and bear that she should do a work slowly which he will do well.” (207)
That may be a good thought to end this episode with: let us not be slow to be patient, but let us be diligent to do well whatever we put our hands to.